Gwangmyeong Cave

 Lately I've been so busy with make-up classes because of MERS and preparations for summer immersion, so I haven't had time to post. But now my weekends are free again. A few weeks ago I went to Gwangmyeong cave in Seoul and I didn't have a chance to post about it so I will now.

Gwangmyeong Cave is located in Central Seoul and is the only cave in the city. This cave was an abandoned coal mine and now is a theme cave park. There are about 50 open caves throughout the 8 levels of the cave. The cave is about 27m in depth. The cave was originally used to excavate gold for war supplies in the early 20th century. There are lots of attractions inside the cave like the Golden Waterfall, Wine cave, an aquarium, art hall, garden, etc. When you first walk into the cave you are in wind road. It is very windy, like the name says. I didn't bring a sweater and I wish I did, I got cold really fast.

Wind road

Next, we walked through a rainbow tunnel. It is really cute, but it made me look like an Avatar.

There are so many different caves, so they have guides telling you which way to go. This pathway had nothing special in it.

After we passed through the tunnel it took us to the underground aquarium. I was not expecting to see an aquarium underground. Obviously there weren't many different kinds of fish, but they did have a good amount.

After the aquarium, we went through the golden road which has gold in the rocks and displays. *Obviously not real gold*

By the golden road there is a statue of Mother Earth. Not quite sure what the correlation is there but she's dripped in gold. This whole area's theme is just gold.

Mother Earth

Golden Waterfall

Palace of gold

Golden house

After the golden road we took the stairs down to the underground world. There ere so many steps to climb down and also there was so ice on the stairs, so you have to be extra careful not to slip. Half way down the stairs there was tis big statue of Aisha. Now I have no idea who Aisha is but it seems she is very popular. She is supposed to be a fairy but I'm not sure what she is from.

Aisha statue

At the bottom of the stairs there is an area for performances, they have a huge stage and they to 3D shows, light shows and cultural performances. We opted out for the show because we would have to wait about an hour and we didn't want to.

There was also a little art exhibit which had lots of work from Lord of the Ring. Hence this creepy sculpture of Gollum in the background.

That was all that was really down there, so we started making our way back up. There were so many stairs, it was very tiring. Shit is a picture I took from higher up on the stairs.

Underground observatory

They had lots of little exhibit in the smaller areas of the caves with animals, light displays or examples of what miners did in the past down there.

There is even a Modern History Museum. Here you can read about the cave's history and also see pictures of miners and what the cave use to look like.

This was my favourite area, a garden in a cave. The tanks even had fish in the water underneath.

I just might change my mind. I loveeee wine. So this just might be my favourite part in the cave, the wine cave!

They had wine bottles in the cave wall to keep the wine cold. Very unique idea!

There was red wine tasting for adults and juice for children. I found the wine to be too sweet for my liking though.

At the back of the wine cave there was a wine cellar that just goes on and on. So much wine back there.

After seeing the wine cave we made our way back towards the exit. We had to pass back through the garden so we snapped some better pictures since it was less busy.